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Transsexual Seeks to Join San Francisco Police

By Reuters
Contributed by Elizabeth Parker and Bobbie G
San Francisco
March 27, 1998

A former virile National Guardsman is fighting San Francisco's City Hall for the right to join the police force -- as a woman.

"Cristiana Rivas has wanted to be a San Francisco police officer ever since she was a little boy," the San Francisco Examiner said Friday.

Rivas, 39, who underwent a sex-change operation last year, was crushed in January when she learned that her application to join the force had been turned down for psychological reasons.

"I don't have any disorders," Rivas, now a tall, slender woman with high cheekbones, told the newspaper.

After passing the police department's written, oral, and physical exams as well as a lie detector test, Rivas thought she was closing in on her dream of joining San Francisco's finest.

But the police turned her down, saying she failed the psychological part of the application.

Now Rivas, who as Christopher served eight years with the National Guard and earned a bachelor's degree in international relations and military affairs, is appealing the decision to the city's Department of Human Resources, saying she was the victim of a process that doesn't understand transsexualism.

San Francisco police spokesman Sherman Ackerson denied Rivas's claim, pointing out that the force already includes one transsexual -- a sergeant who started out as a woman and became a man.

"Our policy has always been that we do not discriminate against people because of sex orientation, and we are accepting of people who are transgender," Ackerson said.

"This person was precluded from department not because of transgender issue, but apparently because of some other criterion."

Rivas, who quit her job as a clerk at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in expectation of a job with the police, spent $1,000 for her own psychiatric evaluation and came away judged "emotionally fit and stable."

The department was unbending, however, forcing human resources officials to schedule a final psychiatric review on April 6 to determine if she was discriminated against.

Rivas told the Examiner she might take legal action against the police if her psychiatric appeal fails. "I want to believe that the department is not pregnant with the old ways, because I give people the benefit of the doubt," Rivas said.



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